Announcing Spack / SpackDev MVP1a ("The LArSoft Edition")

[Christopher H Green]

The FNAL Spack / SpackDev team is excited to announce the release of "MVP1a—The LArSoft Edition." This is a technology preview designed to introduce interested experimenters to our vision of a post-UPS development, build, test and release system at a point where we are still able to make significant changes to how we move forward.

The Spack Planning Wiki explains further, and has links to documents and presentations you may find useful. If you are new to the idea of a Spack-based replacement for UPS and friends, a useful starting point would be the CLHEP 2018 presentation and paper. We intend that the overall system implementation will satisfy at least all those applicable historical requirements (base document, executive summary) that are currently satisfied by UPS, cetbuildtools, MRB and buildFW / pullProducts / ssibuildshims / the Build Framework Redmine project and associated repositories, and SciSoft, with updates for evolved architectures and platforms..

A README.md file and its associated PDF explains the MVP in excruciating detail, and how to set yourself up to evaluate the system. Some caveats:

• This is a limited, "vertical slice," supporting only SL7, GCC 7.3.0. C++17 and use under a Bash shell environment.
• The installed dependencies will be largely built from source, and therefore significant time and disk space will be required for the first initialization of a Spack Dev development area.
  

I should emphasize that we are interested in feedback of any kind, be it on the system, the documentation, or even on the input requirements. Particularly however, we are interested in any feedback which might suggest directional changes might be required to produce a system which meets everyone's needs.

Please send any feedback or questions direct to spackd...@fnal.gov.

Thanks for your interest,

Chris Green for the FNAL Spack / SpackDev team.